


More than Grief, this Fury

by Valmouth



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Anger, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Isolation, Orphans, What Ifs, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 18:29:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1276459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valmouth/pseuds/Valmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What he’s really started to grasp is that the gunshot in the alleyway is only a median point on a time line that started at the zero hour of conception.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More than Grief, this Fury

He says nothing, because God knows it’s the pot calling the kettle black, but sometimes he looks across at the broody, brilliant man who reveals small parts of himself with such obvious effort and he is furious at the injustice.

The Al Ghuls, Jokers, Banes – yes. All of them, yes. The Mirandas and Harveys and Earles and, oh, probably a hundred other violent, vicious individuals who have thrown down their baptisms of fire, but in the end, they’re easy to categorise. The betrayers, the villains, the disappointments. Bruce knows them and sees them for what they are. The barbs scar and the poisons linger, the breaks ache when autumn comes, but he has names to put to that pain and he shoulders the burden with the same grim stoicism as he shoulders all of Gotham.

Gordon neither weeps nor grudges that stoicism.

It’s what they are, and who Bruce is, and Bruce may be a martyr of some kind but he’s certainly no saint. He’s obsessive, malicious, abrasive, and opinionated and he drives Gordon to despair when he’s not driving him to drink. And that’s now, when the Batman is someone else and things are technically over.

Nothing, Gordon discovers, really ends.

He is still Commissioner; The Batman still lurks somewhere in the shadows behind the mere symbol with its pointy ears and voluminous cape.  They meet more often than not, and these days they put away their public faces.

It’s in light of this that he hears for himself where the damage lies. Where the cracks start.

He doesn’t say anything, of course, because far be it from him to open a can of worms, not when Bruce would never thank him and might actually hurt him for it. Gordon isn’t a coward, but he is also kind. Smashing rose-tinted glasses is never a proud moment. Not to a child still lurking inside the body of a man who hurts because he lives for an unreachable ideal.

That it is unreachable is fairly obvious. He suspects Bruce knows that.

He aches for him, in the paternal way that’s starting to come naturally for anyone who’s twenty years younger than he is.

Besides he was there, wrapping a suit jacket around a boy’s shoulders and promising him – lies, lies, all lies – that things would be okay. 

They aren’t. They were never going to be and they will never have the chance to be but what he’s really started to grasp is that the gunshot in the alleyway is only a median point on a time line that started at the zero hour of conception.

Bruce was happy, he hears. He was happy as a child and life was wonderful.

He looks at the pictures, painted in love with spare, self-conscious minimalism. He admits he looked up everything on the Waynes he could find, six months after revelations amongst the rubble, and all he found were society photographs of a pretty woman and a handsome man. Kind-eyed and warmly smiling, open to everybody they were photographed shaking hands with.

He’s read the police report too, and the shaky statement made by the only witness to the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, itself witnessed by Loeb and a senior detective who turned out to be crooked, and a doctor called Leslie Thompson who still runs several outreach clinics in the Narrows.

People, people everywhere, but Bruce is still alone.

Happy, he hears, in brief, sparse, minimalist references and he looks at the little he knows and thinks of loneliness that hasn’t exactly changed.

A pretty, sweet-faced mother, a nanny, a butler with a penchant for fond indulgence, but no friends. No ridiculous children’s birthday parties, cousins visiting over summer, neighbours listlessly tossing a ball around to fill in time. What there is, is a mansion with a father and a mother, a nanny and a butler, and a little girl.

Two sentences tell him school happened to other people for two years after the shooting, and then it was an experience to be endured. Money, Bruce tells him, buys a lot of favours.

Gordon knows they do. He still sees it buy privacy and distance, self-sufficiency to the point of cloistering. Servants can be paid to be discreet, near-invisible, and gone by dusk. Alfred’s skills are priceless but bought with money and affection, a dual-combination of emotional blackmail and charm.

He thinks of Barbara taking their kids to playgroup, pushing the pram and dragging a toddler to get to the grocery store, planning holidays to visit her cousin in Cleveland and her mother in Chicago. He thinks of Martha Wayne, pretty and warm-hearted, bricking her son up alive in a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of the Palisades.

The Manor now rings with children’s voices – mostly a lot of fighting and cursing and shouting – but Bruce spends his nights alone in a penthouse apartment in the most exclusive building in Gotham. It’s an ivory tower, in essence, and Bruce uses it to look down on the people he thinks he cares so much about.

Gordon looks up, sometimes, standing in anonymity on the pavement, and shivers in the heat of a blistering summer that thankfully clogs his pores and saturates his clothing the way it does to every other poor schmuck who can’t afford to live in a succession of air-conditioned rooms.

It isn’t only the isolation, though, or the luxury. It isn’t only the lack of people. It’s what these three factors have combined to create.

The perfect storm, John calls it once, which is as close as they ever get to giving this madness a name.

The Perfect Storm.

Loneliness, isolation, grief… and self-exile.

This, at least, even Bruce sees.

It doesn’t matter if he’s in Gotham or not, if he’s anywhere else in the world. It doesn’t matter where his body is. His exile exists in his mind and his heart, in his soul and maybe in that damaged bit of his psyche that ties him eternally to a dark alleyway in the past while the rest of the world moves on with the future.

The whole world looks forward, and Bruce, for all his incredible mental prowess, doesn’t. And no one has ever tried to change that.

This is the crime, Gordon thinks, there is no ogre. No looming spectre. There is fear, there is terror, yes, and there is tragedy. But there is no one who put a foot down and set boundaries.

Bruce laughs about it, self-aware but blissfully ignorant, and he doesn’t seem to realise that he is spoilt in the most tragic sense of the word.

A relative came forward to contest the late Thomas Wayne’s will and the guardianship of his heir. The relative was sent summarily packing.

Possibly a good thing: Gordon is Commissioner of Police and he has access to information beyond just the case files and official reports. He gets hearsay and rumour, too, when he chooses to go looking, and the relative is one stupid mistake away from Federal prosecution. A drunk and a liar, a man who cheats on his taxes and his wife and is too small-minded to be anything but a greedy, pathetic little man.

No one worth Bruce Wayne’s time and attention. Certainly not worth his respect. And with this man, respect is a prerequisite for affection.

The patrician profile is austere as Bruce sinks into contemplation and Gordon thinks of six kids growing up cheek-by-jowl. Not enough space, not enough money, not enough attention. Roughhousing as regulation and the almost feral belief that if you didn’t eat quick someone was going to steal the food off your plate, your present out from under the Christmas tree. Never in hatred and always in love and certainly none of them starved or suffered real want.

That is not an experience for the only heir to a billionaire industrialist. To a philanthropist so beloved his death was a city-wide event, with cameras thrust into his traumatised orphan’s face.

He gets that. He gets the sickness of it, the twisted distaste and the reason why shadows are welcome and light isn’t. What he doesn’t get, is why, when the cameras were turned off, no one but a cheat and the family butler came forward.

Where was Leslie Thompson? Where was mother’s family? Her parents? Her third cousin twice removed, if necessary. Where were the friends and neighbours? Gotham businessmen are two steps away from loan sharks by reason of owning more expensive accountants and lawyers but even amongst them, in Thomas Wayne’s whole network of admirers and friends and allies, there was no one who bothered to open the door to that mansion and lay a hand on the boy’s shoulder?

There is also one final fury – where was Alfred?

Right there, yes, but children heal. He’s seen it. He’s seen them. Bruce was isolated and independent and shut off from the world but his relationship with Alfred is closer than most sons have with their fathers.

But Alfred says ‘sir’ and ‘Master Wayne’ and plays chef and chauffer and commissar while doling out advice that Bruce can choose to listen to or ignore, as he sees fit. With no repercussions, no complaint, no explanation.

Alfred is only one man, but he is the one who really matters, and given that children heal from worse – torture, near fatal injury, rape – a murder in an alleyway and the circus that followed should have been something to work through, not an insurmountable odd.

Bruce should have healed.

He hasn’t.

The Batman is testament to that. Rachel, Ra’s, a higher purpose – these are all factors. The truth is that Bruce is still the little boy in the police station. He’s trapped there. Stuck. And no one lifted a finger to get him out.

Gordon tries to imagine what the world would be if someone had.

Perhaps they would have failed. Perhaps Bruce would have been angrier, more hateful. Perhaps he would have extracted his pound of flesh from the world in a blaze of bad publicity and drunk and disorderlies until the moment he went too far and made a mistake bad enough to change his young life forever.

Of course, they might have succeeded.

Rachel Dawes might have laid a hand on his arm and dragged him reluctantly into the real world. The world his parents championed for everyone but their precious son. Maybe Bruce would have taken his place on the company board with a more serious eye, a more honest face. Maybe he would have made his name and his fortune without a mask to hide behind.

Maybe, even now, he’d be working too hard and taking his wife and kids for granted except for moments when he comes home and catches the sound of children’s voices ringing the manor.

There’d be no Batman.

Gordon pictures it. His instinct is to see it as an idyll.

No Batman, no Joker, no Bane, the monorail still creaking and Dent as DA. He’d still be married to Barbara. He’d still be a captain.

But life isn’t idyllic. He’d have his children, but he’d also have Falcone, Maroni, Gambol, the Russian. He’d still have Loeb and Judge Harman and Flass watching his every move.

Perhaps Rachel would have married Dent, and Bruce’s big mistake would have been a Vegas wedding to a woman with more steel in her heart than softness. Maybe Bruce would have ignored the whole world and chased the money and maybe he’d have cut corners in his own brilliant, near-criminal way to get what he wanted.

Maybe he’d have deluded himself and everyone else into believing that he was right and good and doing this for the benefit of a whole city. He’d have succeeded.

Gordon believes in Batman. Gotham could have believed in Bruce Wayne.

“You’ve been watching me all evening,” Bruce says, voice breaking into his thoughts, “What’s on your mind?”

He looks up from his contemplation of one immaculate shoe to an even more immaculate shirt. Even in repose the mask is perfect. Glossy and shiny and carefully arranged. The artful tousled look of the hair sets the right tone for a businessman at home, human enough to run his fingers through his hair and not care.

And he knows, because he always does, that tonight will not be the night that he answers that question truthfully.

Mostly because he once lied to a little boy in a police station. He told him it would be alright, and it wasn’t. The result of it is sitting here, a void in the shape of a man, with no true life except the secret one he doesn’t share.

“Nothing,” he says, and locks the fury down before it can drown him.

 


End file.
